The Taming of the Queen

Obediently, I bend my head for Nan to remove my hood, and her husband gives her the crown. It is the right size, it settles on my forehead like a headache.

‘Is it new?’ I ask faintly. I long for it to be newly made for me.

He shakes his head. ‘Whose was it?’

Nan makes a little gesture with her hand as if to warn him to be silent.

‘It was Anne Boleyn’s crown,’ he tells me. I feel it pressing down on my head as if I might sink beneath the weight of it.

‘Surely he doesn’t want me to wear it today,’ I say awkwardly. ‘He’ll tell you when,’ he says. ‘Important feast days or when you are meeting foreign ambassadors.’

I nod, my neck stiff, and Nan takes it off for me and puts it back in the box. She closes the lid as if she does not want to see it. Anne Boleyn’s crown? How can it be anything but cursed?

‘But I’m to take back the pearls,’ William says, embarrassed. ‘They were brought in error.’

‘Which pearls?’ Nan asks her husband.

He looks at her, still carefully not looking at me. ‘The Seymour pearls,’ he says quietly. ‘They’re to be kept in the treasure room.’

Nan bends down and picks up the ropes and ropes of pearls, milky and glowing in her hands, and piles them back in their long box, the strands running up and down the length of it like a quiescent snake. She hands them to William and smiles at me. ‘It’s not as if we didn’t have a fortune in pearls already,’ she says, trying to cover the awkward moment.

I walk with William to the doorway. ‘Why is he taking them back?’ I ask him in an undertone.

‘For remembrance of her,’ William tells me. ‘She gave him his son. He wants to keep them for the prince’s future wife. He doesn’t want anyone else wearing them.’

‘Of course, of course,’ I say quickly. ‘Tell him how pleased I am with everything else. I know that her pearls were special.’

‘He is at prayer,’ my brother-in-law says. ‘He is hearing a Mass for her now.’

Carefully, I maintain my expression of sympathy and interest. The belief that God will shorten the days that a soul waits to enter heaven if He is offered a hundred Masses, a thousand prayers, bonfires of incense, was dismissed by this king, and the chantries closed. Even the chapel that he dedicated to pray for Jane’s soul was abolished; I didn’t know that he still clung to a belief that he has forbidden to the rest of us – the hope of praying someone out of purgatory.

‘Stephen Gardiner is holding a special Mass for Queen Jane,’ William tells me. ‘In Latin.’

Surely it’s a little odd to be praying for the dead queen on the first day of the king’s honeymoon? ‘God bless her,’ I say awkwardly, knowing that William will report this to his royal master. ‘Take her pearls and keep them safe. I will pray for her soul myself.’

Just as the king promised, the word goes out that the new queen has a liking for pretty birds. One of the rooms off my presence chamber is emptied of furniture and filled with perches and cages. At the windows are little aviaries for the singing birds from the Canary Islands. When the sun pours in through the thick glass they chirp and preen and flutter their little wings. I keep them according to colour, the golds and yellows together, the greens next door to them, while the blues flit their little wings against a sky that mirrors their colour. I hope that they will breed true. Every morning, after chapel, I visit my bird room and feed them all by hand, loving the feeling of their scratchy light little feet as they perch and peck for seed.

To my delight one day, a dark-skinned lascar sailor with a silver ring in his ear and his face tattooed, more like a painted devil than a man, comes to my presence chamber with a huge bird, as blue as indigo and as big as a buzzard, sitting on his clenched fist. He sells it to me for a ridiculously high price and now I am the very proud owner of a parrot with black knowing eyes. I name him Don Pepe, since he speaks nothing but the most obscene Spanish. I will have to put a cover over his cage when the Spanish ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, comes to pay his respects, but Nan assures me that he’s a hard man to shock: after years at the court he has heard far worse.

The king gives me a new horse for riding, a beautiful bay mare, and a puppy, an adorable spaniel with a shining tan coat. I take him with me everywhere and he sits at my feet even when I go to chapel in the morning. I’ve never owned a dog that was not a working dog before, only the hounds for hunting in the stables at Snape, or the sheepdogs with their quick dashes here and there.

‘You are the most idle thing,’ I tell him. ‘How can you live with yourself when all you have to be is ornamental?’

‘He’s very sweet,’ Nan agrees.

‘Purkoy was a darling,’ Catherine Brandon remarks.

‘Oh, what was Purkoy?’ I ask.

‘Anne Boleyn’s dog,’ Nan frowns at Catherine. ‘Nothing like little Rig, here.’

‘Is there anything new?’ I ask irritably. ‘Is there anything that I do that one of them hasn’t already done?’

Catherine looks embarrassed.